Moving Forward on Basic Income • Hacker News Board

Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#951

Post by MrMullen » Wed, Jun 01, 2016, 5:18 PM UTC

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #773

MrMullen wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Social Security is not a give away. People have paid into SSI for years and they are getting their money out of it. No one is giving them free money and they free to blow it as they see fit.

Social Security started out paying benefits to people who never paid in. The money you pay to Social Security is for your parents and the money they paid was for their parents.

You are splitting hairs. I pay into SSI and there is an expectation that I will get a certain amount out of it based on when I retire and when I die. It is known today what I will get out in the future. Also, since the Social Security fund holds a ton of T-Bills (Think savings account), the argument that people who are retired now are getting someone else's money is technically wrong. If the Social Security fund held no T-Bills and young people were paying into a fund that was then immediately paid out to retirees, then I would agree with you.

Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#952

Post by talmand » Wed, Jun 01, 2016, 5:20 PM UTC

krashnburn200 wrote: post #901

dilemma wrote: post #887

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scenario: You're married with 2 kids and live in San Francisco. Is an $8,000/year UBI going to enable you to quit your $100,000/year job without another lined up?

Obviously it would. You are trying to conflate having a family with living in an over priced high demand location. Try again.

I have no idea what this means in relation to the scenario. Can you explain?

Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#953

Post by pj_mukh » Wed, Jun 01, 2016, 5:22 PM UTC

alttab wrote: post #936

platz wrote: post #810

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Take an IPhone - you find a variety of technologies - each one was created by some government grant... The collective production of wealth, which is then privately appropriated.. it's very easy to start thinking of basic income as a dividend that goes to the collective that was responsible for collectively producting the wealth." "We need to create a system whereby society stakes a claim to the returns to aggregate…

Except "collectively" is very misleading when you're taking the capital gains from say, 20k employees of a tech company and re-distributing it to 300M / 6 Billion people. Generally I agree that being fed and housed will remove constraints on labor allocation - but its a slippery hill that ultimately leads to globalist communism. I'm not being hyperbolic - this is the system essentially described in the quotes above.

No, actually that's straight up hyperbolic. There is no upper bound on the 20k employees' income i.e. not communism (or socialism even).

Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#954

Post by carapace » Wed, Jun 01, 2016, 5:32 PM UTC

jrochkind1 wrote: post #763

carapace wrote: post #649

A lot of the discussion here seems to revolve around UBI as a solution for poverty and homelessness, but I would argue that that's missing the point. As I wrote this this morning in re: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11807201 """ Keep in mind when discussing UBI, especially in the context of poverty, that it is not a solution to poverty. It is a solution to automation crashing demand by throwing earners permane…

Why do you feel the need to distinguish between "the bum", and "you", a victim of "automation crashing demand by throwing earners permanently out of the economy." Can't some portion of current 'bums', or the homeless, be victims of "automation crashing demand by throwing earners permanently out of the economy" too? I would think they are. Hasn't the process already begun, a long time ago, if perhaps speeding up now?…

Yes, in fact, this is exactly the point I was making. People are talking like the homeless are someone else when the rationale for UBI, in my opinion, is that we are almost all about to be homeless (unless we adjust our systems.)

Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#955

Post by sidek » Wed, Jun 01, 2016, 5:36 PM UTC

pithic wrote: post #946

DonaldFisk wrote: post #867

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't have to come from income tax. It could come from unearned sources of income, such as a tax on land, or on interest.

Or it could fall from the sky, or grow on trees... I agree with one point: UBI will provide freedom -- the freedom of some fraction of society to live at a very low standard at the expense of the remainder. Sure, a high-income family, burdened by UBI taxes and other monstrosities, could decide to leave their jobs, leave their home, schools, neighborhood, and live in a UBI ghetto. To pursue art...

I will meet your challenge head-on and say that that UBI is a worthwhile task, even presented worse than in your imagination. Humans have the right to dignity, food and shelter, and I think even those who are lazy, angry, worthless, deserve these as much as do any other.

But your argument relies on other inherently problematic parts of the American system.

-You say that people would have to "live in a UBI ghetto". Sure, they won't be able to afford a six bedroom house or a downtown Manhattan apartment off UBI. But in cities with public transit, and with non-ridiculous building restrictions, why can't the answer be "downsize and move ten minutes away"?

-You tie high-performing schools to high-income neighbourhoods. This is true in the US, but for bad reasons. Public schools should, and already in many parts of the world do, accept people who want to come from any nearby geographic location. A particularly effective example is the city of Edmonton, in Canada. Kids can choose to go to any high school in the entire metropolitan region (of course with capacity preference for nearby students, which is rarely reached). And it works extremely well.

-You assume through the pejorative "ghetto" that life in a neighbourhood with many UBI recipients will be undesirable. But why is this true? Just because people are less monied does not mean they are worse. In countries which do not allow their poor citizens access to mental health support, sufficient food and education, etc., outcomes are worse. But a high enough UBI would allow these citizens to fix those problems themselves.

Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#956

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Jun 01, 2016, 5:37 PM UTC

blastrat wrote: post #942

Hey EVERYBODY, this topic is all what actual economists , you know literal big E Economists, study; so, while actual economists can disagree about this topic, they disagree from a basis of understanding some things. People who have not studied economics--for which the prerequisite is calculus and also statistics so if you haven't taken those, you haven't taken economics--...people who have not studied economics, micr…

[deleted]

Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#957

Post by CPLX » Wed, Jun 01, 2016, 6:03 PM UTC

alttab wrote: post #936

platz wrote: post #810

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Take an IPhone - you find a variety of technologies - each one was created by some government grant... The collective production of wealth, which is then privately appropriated.. it's very easy to start thinking of basic income as a dividend that goes to the collective that was responsible for collectively producting the wealth." "We need to create a system whereby society stakes a claim to the returns to aggregate…

Except "collectively" is very misleading when you're taking the capital gains from say, 20k employees of a tech company and re-distributing it to 300M / 6 Billion people. Generally I agree that being fed and housed will remove constraints on labor allocation - but its a slippery hill that ultimately leads to globalist communism. I'm not being hyperbolic - this is the system essentially described in the quotes above.

> its a slippery hill that ultimately leads to globalist communism. I'm not being hyperbolic - this is the system essentially described in the quotes above.

That's not correct. Communism is ownership of the means of production. Nobody has proposed that the technology company be owned or operated by the government.

What's being proposed is a reallocation of streams of income. While I understand there is some vague similarity, these are not at all the same things. The crucial difference being that market forces are still quite free to allocate capital.

Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#958

Post by zo1 » Wed, Jun 01, 2016, 6:07 PM UTC

geon wrote: post #870

pithic wrote: post #861

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The Mafia loves to give us options that we can't refuse, to make us offers we can't refuse. Send us a fat portion of your workers' pay to fund our Utopian vision. Or else.

But paying your taxes isn't presented as an option .

You try tell that to the individuals who claim we live in a "voluntary" society. One "voluntarily" pays his/her taxes. Really, once you start peeling past it, it's a never ending stream of contradictions and state double-speak.

Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#959

Post by ethbro » Wed, Jun 01, 2016, 6:12 PM UTC

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #890

lewisl9029 wrote: post #804

The most compelling case I've seen made recently for basic income is from Yanis Varoufakis (the infamous Greek finance minister who resigned after refusing to agree to the terms of the bailout that the Greek people voted against in a referendum): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvgdtF3y0Ss There were many gems in that talk, but this one stood out to me in particular: "The right to turn down a job is essential for a w…

Its a replay of something called "Enclosure" in Britain in the 1700s (actually for several hundreds of years) where the commons got fenced and contracted out. It meant laborers could no longer live for a while off the land - a brace of rabbits, a partridge for the pot. So labor had to work for an employer to live, at whatever pay the employer chose. Which essentially enslaved them. Or so the argument went.

I think it's an interest ebb and flow of history. The US had (and continues to have) a similar process related to grazing lands in the West (someone correct if I'm wrong).

But the broader theme of "in order to make more, we privatize this resource so that it may be exploited more efficiently" starts to become questionable in a hypothetical post-material scarcity, "we don't need more" world.

Re: Moving Forward on Basic Income

#960

Post by newobj » Wed, Jun 01, 2016, 6:13 PM UTC

bduerst wrote: post #758

newobj wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has got to be the most pathetic strawman argument I've seen on HN in a long time. "BI doesn't work because it can't perfectly protect the most pathological outliers"? Ok. Did anyone say it would solve this scenario? And I'm sorry, but what existing agency currently helps people back on their feet after their 12th car accident in the first place? I'm really struggling to see the unequivocal BI take-down you tried…

They're asking how bad actors will be handled by the system. It's using an analogy to ask a question, not propping up a straw man and knocking it down.

The question is utterly hyperbolic, that's why it's a straw man. Phrasing your answer in the form of a question does not magically grant rhetorical validity to your line of reasoning.